


Sirens, Stars, and Smoke

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 18:56:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2121018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mike Stoker, in brief: from boy to man, from boot to engineer, from yearning to understanding.  </p><p>Or, Mike grows up, discovers his sexuality, makes a living, and meets Captain Hank Stanley.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sirens, Stars, and Smoke

Mike Stoker was not a city boy. It was not that he was some rural ridge-born redneck, either, but he did come from a place you could see the stars at night, and really see them too not just imagine them as sparks between the drifts of smoke and smoke and sodium lights. Mike had grown up in a small town of gossip and dust and hypnotizing bus rides to and from hypnotizing school days and long weekends spent off in the brush, working on his 4-H projects, camping by a shining lake tucked into the mountains. Mike, at eight, was a wild child. At ten, a pirate though his ships were rock ledges and his oceans the wide sweep of the dusty horizon and the whisper of hot wind through dry, dead brush. 

When Mike Stoker was twelve years old a brush fire came down from the mountain like a skulking, black-eyed devil to devour the town he had known all his life, to crush it in its cinder teeth to melted glass and smoke-washed brick and spears of siding left poking out of houses like bones. His cousins had lost their home in the fire, and came to stay a while. It was crowded in the house and the youngsters were sent to roving, just for a little peace and quiet. Mike’s younger brother and sister whined, and his older sister pined in her quiet way after her friends, the high school boys and girls scattered in the wake of the fire’s chaos, their gathering places reduced to char and tears of men who had made their lives and their fathers lives and their grandfathers lives in the hills. 

Mike went out alone. He was eight years old again and a cougar in the hills. He was twelve and he wanted to be alone, he wanted to count the stars, he wanted to sit in the desert dark and listen for the sirens. He was turning thirteen and something stirred in him to see the men in long coats move among the flames like ghosts, their faces coal-black and their voices like the raking of goals. His mother had made lemonade and sandwiches and the whole world tasted like ash. They were not the Crimson Pirate or Robin Hood or Long John Silver or Superman but they fought the fire like they were wolves taking down some perilous beast, and they were kind beneath their sooty brows, they played games with the boys and took the tokens of the girls with them, and left their sweat and smoke on books and Barbie dolls and racing cars and upturned faces. They moved among each other like one, like parts of a whole, like joints in a skeleton like Mike had seen in science class, peeling the skin off a road-killed groundhog their teacher had brought in.

He saw one of them sit at his mother’s kitchen table with his coat off, his bared skin startlingly pale under the canvas, his leg cut deeply and the blood black on his pants and on the floor the color of blackberries dripping hot from a pie. The man’s breath came fast and high, his eyes like stars, and his fist clenched tight while his friend bathed and bandaged the wound, looking up now and then. Looking up now and then - “How’s it feelin’, Tommy? How’s it feelin’?” 

Tom the fireman sat in his mother’s kitchen arching his neck to see out the window to the hills, the look on his face pained as if his leg had been cut off, not just cut deep. Mike had a brother. Mike had cousins. Mike understood family, up until the moment he walked into the kitchen for a glass of water and saw Tom’s eyes searching the smoky hills.

Mike sat with him. He was quiet. At twelve turning thirteen he did not understand, not really, but he had the yearning for it, and he put a glass of water in front of Tom. Seven years later, on his first brush assignment, he would know what it was like to be Tom, to be Tommy, waiting, like a chained dog. Tommy’s blue eyes struck him in the kitchen like flint to tinder, and he didn’t understand, but his body yearned, too, as much his heart and mind. When he dreamed, after the fire, he dreamed of Tommy’s neck and his blue eyes and dark, rumpled hair, and yearning. There were hills in his dreams, and kitchen tables, and long heavy coats, and hands that wrapped a wound tenderly, eyes that looked up, voices that asked for how-are-you-fine, how-are-you-really, there was what he learned later to call love in his dreams, but he was a gawking adolescent then, and knew nothing, really. He just had the searching in him, the way he looked at the stars. 

Mike Stoker was not a city boy, his mother reminded him, and his father reminded him, and his teachers reminded him, and his brother and sisters reminded him, and the only people who didn’t remind him were his 4-H instructor (who signed him up for the LA County firefighter’s entrance exam), and his cousin (who drove him to the test, and later to the academy). But he was adaptable, and he adapted to the city, because fire was fire and it did what it liked unless good men stopped it, corralled it, contained the beast until it hissed and spat and lay down and crumpled into ash. In the city Mike took his yearning down from its shelf inside his mind and held it up to the light and looked through it, saw the dreams of Tommy and tenderness and the way a man looked up at the hills and saw himself reflected, because he loved his crewmates, thought of them as kin.

His first lover in the city was not the girl he thought it would be, but a man about his age, a police officer (the badge in his wallet said, but the man shook his head, don’t tell, because the city was a lot like the country that way, at least when it came to button-down shirts and badges and brothers), and neither of the knew what to do (the police officer, Jack was his name, had some ideas and claimed worldliness because he had arrested at least ten men for some offense or other, and this grated on Mike’s understanding of sensible, but he let it slide because Jack was lovely and supple) but it was alright, it was alright. He loved Jack until Jack’s eyes closed up and got hard and he never saw Jack again, although years later Johnny would mention an attempted suicide, a jumper, who’d just crossed the threshold of sky and stonework as the paramedics pulled up, and wound up crippled in the end. 

"Damn waste," Johnny had muttered, bristling about it harder than he usually would’ve, and even Roy was quiet. "Goddamn waste of it, his partner said he was the best, Christ, his partner… "

Quiet moved among them like a fog. Mike thought of Jack. He did not want his gentle lover to be the conflicted, crippled man in a hospital bed whose partner - whose partner…

There could have been a hundred cops named Jack, he thought. There could have been a thousand.

When Mike was promoted to engineer they gave him a new station to work at and an old beast of an engine to work on. But the engine was his, more than the station or the men working there just yet, and he loved the beast and treated her kind. They went through three or four captains, that first year, and Marco (who had a wicked streak) would alternately needle Chet or Johnny that it was their fault, that captains couldn’t handle one or both of them at once. Roy would try not to laugh. Chet would come up with some lengthy diatribe. Johnny would sputter and stomp around and fold his lanky arms and look away.

And then there was Hank Stanley, and when Mike saw him that first morning his mind tumbled back to twelve years old, his mother’s kitchen, and Tommy, not touching the glass of water, only staring at the hills. Bright star-bitten eyes and black rumpled hair, but Hank was lean where Tommy had been broad, and Hank was younger, he thought, than Tommy would be now. Hank played at being a hard-ass, but he was a brother to the bone, and he fit in immediately, drawing a line on Chet’s antics and trusting Roy and Johnny to each other, leaving Marco to keep an eye on Chet and Mike -

Mike caught Hank the second day out, during a lull, slipping close to the beast, almost grazing her with his fingers, and drawing back when he saw Mike. 

"Sorry," he’d said. Johnny and Chet were arguing over something. Marco was cooking and that’d shut Johnny up soon enough, if they didn’t get a call first. Roy was playing the peacemaker and this was all in the dayroom, not in the bay, where Hank was gazing at the beast with the wistful look of a man who had recently had his own to tend. "Just, we - I - we had one like her, at sixty-eights, just like her, except she had this way of grinding into third that made you think she was about to bust apart, and the handle on pump three was always a little stiff, and the reservoir gauge you had to read five higher since the sensor didn’t work quite right, so, no, not just like this one - "

"She’s a great piece of work," Mike said, walking up quiet and in that moment falling as if in pieces madly in love with his Captain, not just for his long throat and his dark rumpled hair and his eyes, but for the tenderness in his hands, in a profession where they were not instructed or meant to be tender. Fire was death, it was, fire was a ravenous thing that came down from the lightning and the hills and ate through acres of land in a heartbeat, fire drew buildings down like Venetian blinds, fire choked you and strangled you and stripped your skin and fire, fire in the mountains could save your life, the light of fire in the eyes was kind, and fire in the belly was the breath of dragons. Hank touched the beast with his long fingers. 

"She’s my first," Mike said. "Got assigned here right from the promotion."

"Yeah?" Hank’s face had brightened. "Ah, you should’ve seen the first engine I ever was assigned to - 1955 Mack pumper, uglier than a bulldog in an evening dress." 

Mike laughs. “But you loved her right?”

"Oh, ‘course I did, she was mine. But she was pretty awful. Ran like a sack of rocks in a dryer." He sighs. "But then they gave me the ‘65 Crown and man, I could’ve divorced my wife for her…"

"Don’t think she’d have liked that. Your wife or the engine."

Hank laughs then, and Mike opens his mouth to say something, to tell Hank about the beast, but then there’s a commotion from the dayroom and Chet yelping and Marco yelling in Spanish and Hank slips into Captain’s face as simple as slipping into his turnouts, and goes to tear them all down a peg. 

Mike stands by for a moment, his hand on the beast’s driver’s side door. He’s a long way from twelve, a long way from nineteen, a long way from a lot of firsts. He’s yearned and searched. He’s looked for the stars, where he knows they must be, beyond the smoke and smog. 

His captain is in the dayroom not yelling, because Hank Stanley does not yell. His engine is still and quiet. Mike strokes her red, gleaming flank and turns to see about dinner.


End file.
